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Reading a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature is a comprehensive exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing.Examining how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences, Isabelle Hesse demonstrates the ''colonial'' turn taken by these representations since the founding of the Jewish state. Following the dynamics of this turn, the book demonstrates new ways of questioning received ideas about victimhood and power in contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and world literature.>
List of contents
1. Introduction: From the Enlightenment to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Ideas of Jewishness in the Modern and Contemporary Period
2. The Complexities of Victimhood: The Holocaust and Israel in German-Jewish Literature
3. Rewriting the Foundational Myths of Israel: Shulamith Hareven’s Thirst: The Desert Trilogy and David Grossman’s See Under: Love
4. Minority, Exile, and Belonging in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood
5. Black Jews, White Arabs: Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Mizrahi Literature
6. ‘Within the Bounds of the Permissible’: Palestinians in a Jewish National Space
7. Imagining the Other: Jewish Settlers, Soldiers, and Civilians in Palestinian Literature
8. Conclusion: ‘We are not all Jews’: Resisting Jewish Victimhood in Metropolitan Literature
Bibliography
Index
Summary
Reading a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature is a comprehensive exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing.
Examining how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences, Isabelle Hesse demonstrates the ‘colonial’ turn taken by these representations since the founding of the Jewish state. Following the dynamics of this turn, the book demonstrates new ways of questioning received ideas about victimhood and power in contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and world literature.
